It is time for Measure Y to go.

If we are going to get any serious community policing and divert our young offenders into any kind of restorative justice programs, we need to stop wasting our time with our community-policing-through-regressive-parcel-tax Measure Y.  http://www.measurey.org/

We can also do without Measure B that we had to pass later to keep from losing the whole thing because the city did not meet the police staffing levels it promised.  

I am sure that some will be happy to hold up a laundry list of numbers lauding the accomplishments of Measure Y.  Unfortunately, Measure Y and the Measure Y way of doing things do not measure up. 

The reason that the Measure Y boosters and folk from “the inner” circle of influence hold up a laundry list of numbers lauding the accomplishments under Measure Y is because if you did not hear it from them, you would never know.  This is a crime in and of itself.  Much has been done and the ground work for many a good effort has been laid.  Why then do we always seem to be just at the beginning of our effort?  

Groundwork should have led to some serious building and results by this time.  But there is little happening at a size that is being felt on the street.  Many do not know what Measure Y is, others have not even heard of it.  In the course of talking to residents and asking for their vote, I have only heard a few positive reports on Measure Y programs.  Most tell me that they only have a vague idea of what it is about and have not seen any effects.  The rate of robberies, shootings and truancy bear this out. The numbers of our young people entering the criminal justice system year after year is hardly changed. 

This is after how many years?  How can we call it a success?  

The measures that matter tell the same old sad story.  We still have our revolving door, vicious circle of mercilessness around the courts, prison and parole system.  Measure Y in a year does not help as many people who fall into this trap in a week.  We still have large numbers of people who will not cooperate with the police, even in the case of the murder of their own family members.  According to Oakland Police Capitan Anthony Toribio in 2010 about half the families of murder victims would not cooperate with the police investigation.  

And this Spring, like all Oakland Springs, fully half of the youth who should be getting their High School Diploma will not.  That is a measure of failure on our part and a measure of trouble yet to come. 

The jobs of working with our neighborhoods and the jobs of organizing our neighborhoods are always the ones that get the ax first.  If there is a budget problem, they cut the community police officers, if there is a protest against Wall Street, they cut back on community services, and it seems like some in our police force are looking for ANY excuse not to do community policing.  They seem to find that excuse quickly and our political leadership seems to get them back on track slowly.  

One of the biggest problems with the Measure Y way of doing things is that we have no stability.  We lost a lot of ground when we cut the police staff, we lost it again at the last budget, we lost it at Occupy and we continue to see community police officer assignments and community organizing stop, restart and change personnel every semester.  Every time we start and then stop and then restart a program, we have to start a lot of the work as if it were new.  That adds up to lost money, lost trained people and worst of all, lost public willingness to get involved.  

What program can be effective with that kind of instability? 

We spend more time and attention managing Measure Y than we spend on organizing community policing.  We have nobody assigned to implementing restorative justice.  What we do have is a great big pool of money and some requests for proposals that brings the unwanted attention of opportunists and instant self-appointed experts with homemade programs.  Some are good, some are amateurish.  We need to address root causes of our social problems that cause high crime, not hold procurement fairs for a bunch of small outside projects that do not give us the numbers and quality we need.  

I also want Measure Y to go because so much of it is not about Community Policing.   

It is about the Fire Department, it is about school discipline, it is about police staffing levels (thus Measure B) and it is all about all the little political deals that made the “successful politics” needed to get it passed.  This house of cards is unstable and it has fallen more than it has done good work.  People voted for a lot that had nothing to do with community policing when then voted for Measure Y.  

The “smart politics” keeps us from having a smart policy on crime and a smart policy on budgeting.

Community policing and restorative justice is our city policy; we need to enforce it in management.

The job of community organizing should be part of how we do business in our city.  It should be led by civilians and it needs to be intentionally reaching out to whole neighborhoods across race and income differences.  We should really be thinking of how to get our grass roots neighborhoods empowered.  They need to have resources to distribute. We need to engage the difficult social changes we will need to stop the cycle of chronic crime.  If we are going to organize the neighborhoods better than the current (unelected) Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council model then we need to stop telling neighborhoods what to do and let our communities act on their/our own telling us what they need.  Otherwise we will only continue to have token grass roots democracy without many backers or any effective power.  

The job of restorative justice needs to be a real job.  To start with we should review every case BEFORE we hand it to the DA’s office for prosecution.  We have the power, through our police enforcement, not to press charges and we should use it.  EVERY time we arrest someone in Oakland we should review the situation and see if we can deal with them locally.  

Restorative justice is about a lot of things, but first and foremost it is about restoring the damage done.  

SUCCESS=  A local offender on a path to reform and making amends to their victims staying in the community and in school.

FAILURE= Every young person we needlessly send to jail where they get no rehabilitation services and only learn to become more criminal than before and to then be released to a parole system that offers them nothing and cannot keep track of them.  

That FAILURE is the system we have now.  Measure Y notwithstanding.

There is no shortcut to common sense and a common cause on crime.  Measure Y is a gimmick and it has failed because it is a gimmick.  There seems to be quite a bit of consensus about changing how we fight crime and the causes of crime and how we deal with a person caught up in crime.  Otherwise we would not have voted for Measure Y.  Most of us want what Measure Y was SUPPOSED to do. 

We need to make community policing, restorative justice and community organizing part of how we do business as a whole.  Any real improvement will be a difficult process of social change.  We have started this process and made a lot of progress.  We now need to make that progress in the quantity and quality needed to reach the whole of our community. 

Send cash so a woman can get her children back

 Send cash so a woman can get her children back

Friday my friend had her children taken away because she attended a picnic in Mosswood Park in support of the Occupy movement here in Oakland, California. 

I read the “emergency protective order” myself, minus the actual declaration which they did not include, and she is not allowed to see her children and will not even get a day in court until April 23rd.  

There was no warning, no proper filing of papers, nothing.  Her ex just filed like a thief in the dark and snuck the kids out of the school.  She arrived to find them gone.  The school had seen the restraining order, but she had not, nobody was there to serve her or explain anything.  The only cause written on the paper was that she had attended this event at Mosswood Park, which was a picnic in a nice family park with a playground near my house.  We take my kid and her kids to this park all the time. 

First things first, she has no money and she now needs money to hire an experience family law specialist. So send her some cash to “KC”. C/O Don Macleay, P.O. Box 20299, Oakland CA, 94620.  I will give her the letters unopened.  If each of us gives a small amount, we can get her legal fees quickly. If you can give a larger amount, please do so. If you need more information to donate you can contact me.  

I know a lot about this case and I know the children.  It is for them that I am not naming names. They have been having a hard enough time as it is.  Being snatched away from their mom is probably the most hurtful thing anyone could have done to them. She has been their principle caregiver all their lives and they are too old not to be deeply hurt by what their father has just done to them.

My father was a court officer.  When my own divorce nightmare was unfolding he told me that “the system is vulnerable to those willing to perjure themselves” My father was an honorable man who would never perjure himself and I do not think he understood that many do not have those ethics. 

Translation?  Alameda Family Court is a liar's paradise.  Every document you sign says “under penalty of perjury” on it.  I have yet to hear of one case, or an instance in a case, where that was enforced.

In this case, we have a person who has no qualms telling lies in court or anywhere else.  I first met him as somebody else’s boyfriend BEFORE the younger of these two children was fathered. Since I have watched this case I have seen him run the kind of marijuana grow that gives medical grows a bad name.  He has told every kind of contradictory story in court and he has tried to attack this woman by distorting her medical history and her sexuality.  I also know his other two ex’s and their children.  One is trying to get him to pay his support and the other has recently stopped doing their custody exchange in the police stations. 

Not only does lying work well in Alameda Family Court, so does slander and smear campaigns. This is now the third time he is slandering this woman to take the kids for himself and this time he is using her politics.

Let us be very clear about something.  The kids were not ever in any danger at the picnic at Mosswood Park or at any other Occupy support action.  Despite how it is getting spun in the press, most of Occupy Oakland was more like a street fair than a protest movement.  For a while there was a Children’s Village with a play tent.  The children were separated from any confrontations in both space and time.  

Our family courts and family services are a disgrace.  Just speaking for myself and not about this case, I have no faith in the system.  It urgently needs an outside audit of the judgments, the mediation, Child Protective Services and the outside contractors who are the “evaluators” and “counseling services”. 

For this reason alone we should be helping my friend out.  No woman should become the victim of an abusive husband who can game the system to abuse her again in Family Court. 

In this case he is using her politics against her to take her children away.  If you do not feel personally threatened by that, then I would suggest that there is something you did not understand.

-- Don Macleay dmacleay@earthlink.net 510 290-1200

Commitments for progressive candidates

Commitments for progressive candidates
running for office on a progressive platform

Winning elections is important and much good can come of it.  More good will come of it if we keep our values and ethics once in office.  Cesar Chavez refused any outside help to form his farm worker’s union.  We should learn from that union’s history that if the community is to have progressive representation, it is best to develop it from within and have the deep support and trust of the people.  Our ethics and values are as important as our political ideas, if not more.  

Commitment to social solidarity
We advocate universal education, health care, employment, housing etc from a deep sense of community and an understanding that all of us has a responsibility for the health of the community.  We advocate economic justice. 

Commitment to movement solidarity
We see ourselves as part of the larger progressive movement.  We honor, respect and nourish all the other honest efforts that are being made.  We see our campaigns as a way to advocate community solutions to community problems.  We see our own election as part of widening the scope and strengthening the whole of this movement.  

Commitment to having the support of the people
As movement builders, the support of the public is the core of our strength.  Together with the people we find empowerment through shared experiences.  Public support is the only basis for an honest mandate of an elected official.  

Commitment to community service
Running for office, and holding office if elected, is part of an overall personal dedication to be a positive contributor to the community.  We should honor the opportunity to do public service by fully serving to all of the constituents and treating offices held as a public trust.  We commit to doing all jobs honestly, openly, for all of the members of the represented community and above all with care and professionalism.  We are committed to a high quality of governance.  

Commitment to keeping our freedom of action
We keep ourselves free to act on our values and beliefs.  We will be free to act on behalf of the office we hold and the people and government we represent. When there are differences dealing with other levels of government, we should be free to advocate change and reform in how all of us are being treated.  

Commitment to democracy
We believe in having all the voices heard and all the people’s views represented fairly.  We believe in grass roots democracy.  We want a city government close to the people and far from big money politics.  

Commitment to peace
We maintain ourselves as advocates of peace, and as opponents of our current wars.  

Commitment to fighting repression
We stand against police violence.  We stand against any acts to intimidate people from exercising their right to free speech, to protest, to go on strike or any other action of the public to advocate for their rights.  We stand up against all forms of discrimination, be it racial, sexual, sexual orientation, linguistic, religious or any other. 

Commitment to fight corruption
We are opposed to the legal corruption that surrounds our electoral process and do not participate in it.  We will not accept big money, will not leverage influential people or accept the monopoly of the media gate keepers.  We will keep ourselves free of conflict of interest involving any person or business, including non-profit, that accepts government money.  We are not part of money politics and will fight for transparency and public trust. 

The Kaiser Convention Center should be occupied.

How many cities have a boarded up convention center? 

I know a lot of cities in the USA are just like Oakland and have boarded up businesses, boarded up homes and abandoned properties in them. The new American Gothic includes the homeless encampment in the freeway landscaping and the mentally ill on the sidewalks.  But a whole convention center?  

How do we categorize this problem?  

Mismanagement and neglect would be a good category.  That would lump the convention center in with the rotting Victorian mansions, concessions stands and bathrooms in our parks.  Has anyone from the public seen the inside recently?  Is it OK?  It may not be given the way the old gymnasium in North Oakland was allowed to rot with roof leakage so badly that a million dollar wooden floor is now worthless.  I am very serious, when was the last time that building was inspected or open to a press visit?  This building belongs to us, our city is known for neglect.  IS IT OK?  

Under and miss utilization would be another good category.  Back when the Kaiser Center was ostensibly open it was never really getting the attention and bookings it needed.  This is from the same city government that ropes off downtown and builds fences so that it can charge the public for its Art and Soul Festival but cannot find any events for a major convention center on a lake with a Museum, Junior College and a BART station for direct neighbors.  What I was told by those “in the know” at the time of the closure was that we were going to focus on the Fox Theater.  Is that development?  Build one multimillion dollar facility while we throw another away?  

Fiscal fiasco should also be considered as a category.  Who owns the Kaiser Convention Center now?  Who could sell it?  Who could rent it out?  During the circus that passed for a budget debate 6 months ago we “sold” the building from the City to “Redevelopment”.  The building was used as collateral for some loans that got “transferred to the City Hall building”.  That would mean if we did not pay the debts, we would have to sell City Hall to pay it!  Of course that NEVER happens, but jeez.  A lot of things that “never happen” have been happening in state, county and city budgeting recently.   Did they really go through with that plan or was it just still a plan when the State of California shut down the redevelopment agencies?  If they did, who owns the building now?  There is supposed to be a “successor agency” if I understand it right.  Who is that?

Selling a major asset to pay day-to-day bills is not a secure budget plan.  In fact it is about the worst budget plan.  Things like this make me want to raise the bar on the Council selling off public property.  It just should not be so easy to do.  

So now we have a multimillion dollar, historical convention center boarded up in the middle of our city.  The Occupy protestors who wanted to “Occupy” it would have in effect opened it back up.  We all missed a golden opportunity in a cloud of stubbornness and teargas.  All that Occupy energy could help our city at the Kaiser Convention Center. 

The public should insist that the building be put back into use.  If civic groups can turn it into some kind of civic center and pay the utilities, then the city should allow them to do it.  Right now it is just a scandal.  

One of the things that the occupy encampment showed was how much energy was available for this kind of civic center activity.  That little encampment was feeding and housing homeless people.  They had a free health clinic.  There was a series of art programs.  There was a children’s village.  There were library groups, free school, theater etc.  And the list goes on and on from a media center to community gardens.  

Our convention center is a vacant property.  It needs an occupant and we have a volunteer.

Not news.

This is what media bias looks like.

Today The Oakland Green Party was not news.

It was NOT NEWS that 4 Oakland Greens with a group of 40 supporters backed by 5,000 registered voters announced our slate to run in 3 council, and one school board race this November.

I was not news, as I am one of those four and I announced that I will run in the 1st District Council race.

The people who asked questions were not news.  The answers were not news. 
The only place you will hear about our press conference will be in the Indy News and on line. 

After our press conference two of us candidates went across town with lots of friends and fellow Greens and other activists to see a review of police activities around the Occupy Protests. This event was supposed to be hosted by our Citizen’s Police Review Board, but they canceled at the last moment.  The Grand Lake Theater offered a location and Occupy hosted.  We heard reports from experts and saw a 45 min presentation on what the police have really been doing. The chief of police was invited to speak.

All of that was also NOT NEWS. A couple hundred people, including prominent civil rights lawyers, political activists and many Occupy protestors were there.  They might as well join us in the Green Party because together we are all NOT NEWS.

So what is news?

Well according to the Examiner quoting the Tribune:

Occupiers marched from a courthouse to Frank H. Ogawa Plaza for a noon rally only to find about 40 people protesting them.
The group, calling itself Stand for Oakland, was organized by several neighborhood leaders to show public opposition to Occupy Oakland's recent costly demonstrations and its focus on Oakland police, rather than the travails of the poor and middle class.
"I think this will make them see that the citizens are concerned and that the citizens are tired of the actions that they are taking," said Angela Haller, a Neighborhood Watch leader who helped organize the rally.
Among those participating in Stand for Oakland was Councilwoman Desley Brooks, several neighborhood leaders, developer Phil Tagami and Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce official Paul Junge.

When something like this is done in Cuba or Syria we call it a stage managed pro-government demonstration with few, if any, followers not on a public salary.

So, an established political movement and an established civil rights movement are not news, but an astro-turf group invented on the fly by the local wealthy and a politician is headlines? 

A few years ago Amy Goodman, the voice of Democracy Now, spoke at Berkeley High where my son was going to school.  She asked a question that I have not had an answer for:

“If we had state controlled media in America,
how would it be any different than what we have now?” 

We should all ask ourselves some quick questions:
•    Where do all those demo-republicans spend all those campaign adverting dollars? 
•    Ever hear of a company that does not cater to its owners and its clients?
•    What else are we not being told because it does not meet the advertisers’ wishes?

When the same kind of pro system media domination comes to play in Russia, our corporate press talks about how their elections are not free and fair. I agree they do not have free and fair elections in Russia.  Can we call our system where the two official political marketing companies hold all but one of the congressional seats free and fair?  Russia has more political diversity than we do.  

So here is some information that the Greens can share that is also probably not news too:
We are not going to just go away.  Neither is Occupy for that matter. 
We are finding ways to speak directly to the people in this election. 
So has Occupy for that matter.
That is how 5,000 people decided to register Green in the first place. 
And that is why the theater was full, despite the lack of news coverage.

A  suggestion:
Support independent media as if your democracy depended on it because it does.

Occupy is a movement, not an organization

Occupy is a movement, not an organization 

The “straw man” is one of the mainstays of dishonest argument.  It is the art of making your opponent out to be something that he or she is not, and then arguing against that “straw man” depiction instead of arguing against what your opponent is really saying.  This is what is being done to the Occupy movement.  It is being made out to be an organization, and an extreme one at that, and then accused of being an irresponsible organization.  

This whole thing did start with some extreme behavior.  

There was the extreme loss of trillions of dollars worth of real estate and stock value around the world in 2008.  The blurred line between mortgages, banks, securities and ratings agencies was extreme. There was some extreme damage to people’s personal lives, their retirements, their home values and for many many many Americans, there was the foreclosures of them homes and no accommodation of the extreme conditions in employment caused by this housing value collapse.  

The tax break offered to the wealthy, while giving the common people a hard shaft of cutbacks was extreme. It started before this securitized mortgages fiasco under Bush and continued to the letter under Obama.  To combine it with the largest income disparity in US post slavery history makes it all the more extreme.  The only thing that caused us to miss how radical it was the slow build up of the effects.  

The bailouts were very extreme.  The excessiveness of it was reckless as was the lack of accountability.  That we did it without a reform of the banking and investment system showed us who our government works for.  To say that the banks paid it all back is to deal in another type of dishonesty and in case you missed it, to hand the biggest failures in financial history since the crash of 29 enough money to consolidate their banks and holdings even more at a time when the peoples government should have been breaking them up is daring and extreme.  

So extreme in fact that it finally provoked a reaction.  That reaction is Occupy.  

Occupy is a movement against economic injustice.  It is an injustice how the rich own our country and its politicians.  It is an injustice to have so much wealth and so little responsibility for it.  It is an injustice to help out those who profit and force cutbacks on those of us who really make the system work.  

The resistance to the war in Vietnam was also a movement, as was the struggle against segregation and for civil rights.  No one group marked it.  At the time all those who headed it up were slandered and hated by our officialdom.  People fought hard and broke the law to stop those injustices.  

And they are doing so now in the Occupy movement.  

Some were camping, that was illegal or was quickly made so.  Some were feeding the homeless, and that has been illegal for a while already.  Some housed the homeless and thus were slandered with whatever the homeless people were doing that could be pointed to as “wrong”.  And some tried to occupy the Kaiser Convention Center with a march.  These groups of Occupy protestors number in the thousands.  

Others call for strikes, picket banks, hand out flyers, setup mobile libraries, feed the homeless too and all kinds of less publicized actions.  Are these actions less publicized because we are non-violent and that does not fit the straw man the opponents of Occupy want to portray?  You will have to ask the army of spin doctors, think tank pundits and PR agents that work directly for the 1%.  Only they know what the plans are.  The rest of us just get to hear the endless repetition of the talking points.  

Right now the talking points say that our straw man had a good idea, but is going about things the wrong, violent way and that they should go home and the problem should be dealt with in the more civilized manner prescribed by the two official political parties.  

Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and all the war resistors did not buy that line of bull and we should not either.  The last thing we need is advice from the rich and powerful or the enfranchised bureaucrats on how we should oppose their fiscal policies.  We do not need the master’s permission to cry freedom. 

This movement will not go away, not even the “extreme” part of it.  

That Saturday something between two and three thousand young people marched on the Kaiser Center.  After a couple rounds of tear gas and other forms of police force about a third of them gathered back at the plaza.  At a call they got back on the street to try it again somewhere else.  

The powers that be should take pause and realize that those kinds of numbers and that kind of determination is not some fringe phenomena.  Occupy is organized in 1400 locations across the USA because there is a problem and it is not fixed.  This is another fracture in our overall relationship with our nation’s youth.  We have other fractures with other parts of our youth.

Hint to the Mayor and the Chief of Police:  These young people do not believe you.  They do not trust you.  They do not respect you.  They think you are sold out and on the payroll. 

Why should they think otherwise?

And the rest of us?  Well, you know we do not believe you either.  You have had decades to address these economic fairness and general well being issues. What have you done?  From the S and L Crisis to the latest tax give away you had done what the rich want, when they want it, as they want it.  

There are tens of thousands of us who demonstrate peacefully as Occupy.  There are tens of millions of us who sympathize with the Occupy movement for good reasons that stem from what we see with our own eyes in our own lives.  One American in six is officially poor.  Many more are only a paycheck away.  

We are not the priority, the banks are, and everyone knows it. 

Nothing has been done to fix the problems.  Nothing has been done for those losing their homes.  Nothing has been done to pull one in six Americans out of poverty and nothing is being done to keep our governments out of poverty.  We call it cutbacks, other nations call it austerity.  The bailout has been “for-rich-only” as obscenely as things were once “for-white-only.”  As long as this goes on people will be in the streets protesting and demanding justice. 

And I will be one of them.